Open Source Software

Audacity is a free open source digital audio editor and recording computer software application, available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other operating systems. Audacity can be used for post-processing of all types of audio, including podcasts by adding effects such as normalization, trimming, and fading in and out.

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is an image retouching and editing tool and is released under the LGPLv3 and later versions and the GPLv3 and later versions as free and open-source software. There are versions tailored for most operating systems including Linux, OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

GIMP has tools used for image retouching and editing, free-form drawing, resizing, cropping, photo-montages, converting between different image formats, and more specialized tasks. Animated images such as GIF and MPEG files can be created using an animation plugin.

VLC media player (commonly known as VLC) is a portable free and open-source cross-platform media player and streaming media server written by the VideoLAN project. VLC media player supports many audio and video compression methods and file formats, including DVD-Video, video CD and streaming protocols. It is able to stream over computer network and to transcode multimedia files.

LibreOffice is a free and open source office suite, developed by The Document Foundation. The LibreOffice suite comprises programs to do word processing, spreadsheets, slideshows, diagrams, maintain databases, and compose math formulae. It is designed to be compatible with other major office suites, including Microsoft Office, though some Microsoft Office layout features and formatting attributes are handled differently or are unsupported. LibreOffice is available in over 30 languages and for a variety of computing platforms, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger or newer, and Linux. It is the default office suite of most popular Linux distributions.

TileMill is a tool for cartographers to quickly and easily design maps for the web using custom data. It is built on the powerful open-source map rendering library Mapnik – the same software OpenStreetMap and MapQuest use to make some of their maps. TileMill is not intended to be a general-purpose cartography tool, but rather focuses on streamlining and simplifying a narrow set of use cases.

For anyone coming from a GIS or cartography background, the biggest assumption TileMill makes is the final projection – TileMill maps are always projected to “Web Mercator”. As the name suggests, this projection is popular with web mapping applications, thus maps created with TileMill can be displayed using the Google Maps API, OpenLayers, and a number of other projects.